The LG Nitro HD has impressive specs, but falls short where other big, …

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The LG Nitro HD is big in every way on paper: 4.5-inch screen, 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 8-megapixel camera. But while those stats are great, the Nitro HD falls short in many areas that other manufacturers have tweaked to improve user experience. When other companies are paying more attention to the little things that make using a phone great, a phone like the Nitro HD isn't going to cut it by just being good enough.

The Nitro HD is a big and solid-feeling phone, with a plastic textured back that comes off for access to the battery, SIM card, and microSD slot. The rounded edges and smooth bezel make it a little slippery to hold.

The phone has a volume rocker on the left-hand side and a power/sleep button on the top. A microUSB port is centered on the top edge, covered by a plastic door next to a headphone jack. There are three soft buttons along the bottom edge of the screen (Menu, Home, Back) and small slats in the back cover for a speaker.

The top of the Nitro HD, with sleep/power button, microUSB port, and headphone jack

The volume rocker on the Nitro HD

The door hiding the Nitro HD's microUSB port

When playing back audio, the speaker produces slightly better sound with less distortion than what you normally get out of a smartphone, even at the loudest volume. That said, the loudest volume is not very loud at all, and having the sound projecting directly out the back doesn't help. Voice call quality is is fine on the Nitro HD, as good as cell phones get.

There are two cameras on the Nitro HD: 1.3-megapixel front-facing, and an 8-megapixel on the rear that also records 1080p video. It seems to take better photos indoors than out, and scenarios with a lot of light and dark contrast will have some noticeable flare. Better-lit indoor photos looked a little misty. There's also a noticeable lag between pressing the camera button and the shutter—a formerly widespread problem with phone cameras, but in light of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus's and iPhone 4S's near-instant shutters, not one one we should be tolerating for much longer.

An indoor photo with the LG Nitro HD's rear camera

An outdoor photo with the LG Nitro HD's rear camera

The Nitro HD has a 4.5-inch 720x1280 screen that doesn't use PenTile technology, and as a result, it's beautiful. The phone's icons are big and pretty and the display's color balance is great. However, we did find that it is a little underresponsive—the occasional tap would go unregistered. Typing was not as good an experience as we've had on other phones, and our texts sometimes came out rife with typos.

In OS operations, the Nitro HD is very smooth, and there is hardly a hiccup when scrolling and swiping. In apps, though, the action is choppier. The preinstalled weather widget is nice, if a little hiccupy. The preinstalled social widget is particularly laggy, and while other versions of integrated social apps will thread updates from multiple sources, the one the Nitro HD requires you to manually toggle between them. That combined with the occasional lack of response to taps or swipes makes for an unpolished experience. There are also more pre-installed apps on the Nitro HD than we usually notice on an Android phone, including one called Get HD Games that's little more than an ad for Gameloft.

The Nitro HD's own Twitter widget, displaying the most recent tweet it can see... from a week ago.

The Nitro HD runs Android 2.3 on a dual-core 1.5GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 220 GPU, and 1GB of RAM, but these specs belie its real-life performance. The phone blows up Linpack benchmarks, scoring around 52 MFLOPS in single-threaded processes and about 78 MLFOPS in multi-threaded ones. But the phone collapses in GLBenchmark 2.1, scoring 18.8 frames per second in the Egypt Standard test and 27.3fps in the PRO Standard test.

Likewise, the browsing experience could be better. In Sunspider 0.9.1, the Nitro HD scores around 2750ms, which is respectable, but well under the iPhone 4S's 2200ms and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus's 1990-2010ms.

The soft buttons on the Nitro HD illuminate only when in use.

The Nitro HD has a 1830mAh battery, which is large for a smartphone. Unfortunately, the superior display seems consume its fair share of power. We could get through a workday with light to moderate use, including texting, e-mailing, web browsing and a bit of gaming, but found the phone usually conked out shortly after dinnertime. When playing video, we were able to log just under five hours. Given the quality of the screen and the networks available to this phone (4G LTE), the battery performs admirably on the whole.

The Nitro HD isn't entirely rough—you can get where you need to go and accomplish what you need to do. But for the price ($199 with a two-year contract), there are other phones that doesn't compromise so many fronts.

The good

Big, beautiful screen of formidable brightness and color

Decent sound quality

Battery life isn't bad, given the LTE connectivity and non-Pentile screen

The bad

Performance is middling given the specs and price, laggy inside some apps and widgets

Screen occasionally misses a tap or flick of the finger

Camera takes mediocre pictures, has slow shutter

The ugly

Pre-installed app advertising. Not the first phone to do it, but blends less than usual.

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Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston